Forbes columnist Steven Salzberg and author-investigator Joe Nickell will each be awarded the 2012 Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, to be presented by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry at the CFI Summit in October.

Oscar, the Death-Predicting Cat

Making Rounds with
Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.
By David Dosa. Hyperion, New York, 2010. ISBN: 978-4013-2323-3. 225
pp. Hardcover, $23.99.

Dr. David
Dosa, a geriatrician, offers the remarkable notion that a Rhode Island
nursing-home cat named Oscar has a predictive ability: knowing when
a patient is about to die. Dosa’s book, Making
Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Or­dinary Cat (2010), is based on an essay by
Dosa that appeared in the New
En­gland Journal of Medicine
(NEJM). It alleged that since staff members
adopted him two years before, Oscar has “presided over the deaths
of more than 25 residents” (Dosa 2007).

The NEJM
piece was an essay and in no sense a scientific article,
which raises questions about why it was published. If we expected the book
to provide something resembling scientific evidence, we are again disappointed.
Dosa seems primarily motivated to produce a sympathetic, insightful
account about dementia patients, and there is nothing wrong—indeed,
everything right—with that. (As one whose mother had Alzheimer’s,
I am, unfortunately, all too familiar with the heartbreaking issues
involved, including the toll on family members. Until her death, I used
my allotments of vacation time to travel across four states to be with
my mother and invariably left the visits with tears streaming down my
face.)

Enter
Oscar the cat. Few would dispute that pets can provide therapeutic benefits
to patients and family members. And there is little harm in ascribing
human feelings and motives to the animal: a woman maintaining a vigil
for her dying mother said, “[Oscar] was really there for me” (Dosa
2010, 188). (This ascription of human traits or feelings to objects,
deities, or, in this case, animals, is known as anthropomorphism.)

However,
it is another matter to ascribe magical powers to animals. A patient
told Dosa, “Animals have this sixth sense and they can communicate
with us if we understand their language.” She claimed her own cat
“always knew whenever I was sick or my arthritis was acting up. He
would jump on my bed and just sit with me” (21, 22). A woman whose
father died said of Oscar, “This beautiful creature was sending us
a sign” (149).

Dosa
ventures possible explanations for the supposed phenomenon (68):

When you
consider it from a scientific point of view it’s easy to shrug off
suggestions that a cat can predict death. It’s so much easier to say
that he’s just sitting with those patients because of the activity—the
gathering of family, the holding of hands, the saying of good-byes.
It just makes more sense. Or maybe he just likes to hang out with dying
people because they don’t bother him. Most cats sleep two thirds of
the day anyway, so chances are a cat is going to be found on a warm
bed somewhere.

Again, Dosa
observes (217–218):

As cells
die, carbohydrates are de­graded into many oxygenated compounds, including
various types of ketones—chemical mixtures known for their fragrant
aroma.... Could it be that Oscar simply smells an elevated level
of a chemical compound released prior to death? It is certainly clear
that animals have a refined sense of smell that goes well beyond that
of the ordinary human.

However,
he adds, “I like to think of Oscar as more than a ketone early-warning
system.”

Here
we should note the cautionary principle known as Hyman’s Categorical
Imperative (after distinguished skeptic Ray Hyman [Alcock 1994, 89]):
“Do not try to explain something until you are sure there is something
to be explained.” In the case of Oscar, the prescient cat, that
certainty is far from having been established, as we shall see.

Dosa’s
thinking about Oscar was influenced by a nurse named Mary: “Nothing
happens on the unit,” he says, “without her knowing about it.
Even her supervisors have been known to defer to her” (3). She
possesses “intuition” and “always seems to know who actually
needs the most attention” (6)—a quality projected onto Oscar. Throughout
the book Mary declares her belief that “Oscar only spends time with
patients who are about to die” (8), although some family members believe
Oscar is there not for the dying but for the living. “I think he was
there for me,” one said. “In fact, I’m
sure of it” (182).

Mary
admits she also would “like to think” that there is something
more to Oscar’s alleged ability than, say, smell (64). Dosa reports
that she “hated my I’m
a scientist talk”
(68) and that she concedes, “I’m a dyed-in-the-wool animal lover.
It’s not like I’m objective” (190). Yet Dosa singles her out in
his acknowledgments, saying that it was she “who helped me collect
many of the stories that appear in this book” (224).

Dosa’s
use of the word stories is instructive. His evidence is
the kind disparaged in science as anecdotal. That is, it is based on
personal narratives that may be affected by mistaken perceptions, faulty
memory, folkloric influences, and many other faults.

Hearsay
may creep in (as it has done regarding Oscar [e.g., 213]). Biased selection
is a very real problem: there is a natural tendency for believers in
some phenomenon to collect stories supporting it, just as there is for
disbelievers to collect stories discrediting it. In 225 pages of text
(relating some sixteen of Oscar’s supposed successes), Dosa fails
to mention a single instance of Oscar failing to predict death correctly;
yet in a beginning note he begs readers to “forgive the occasional
mistakes” the cat “makes from time to time.”

Oscar’s
purported ability was first noted when he was just a kitten and jumped
onto the bed of a patient who died later that day. But Oscar often came
and went (and was generally characterized as going “in and out”
of patients’ rooms [181, 182]). Never-the­less, once people began
“talking about Oscar,” staff began collecting—even manipulating—the
evidence. In at least one instance, the kitten was actually placed in the bed of a dying
man (67). (Reportedly,
Oscar ran away, only to return a day and a half later when the man really
died.) One wonders, was Oscar placed or coaxed into rooms of other dying
patients?

Moreover,
Dosa admits that “for narrative purposes” he has “made some
changes that depart from actual events” and that “some of the
characters that appear in this book are composites of multiple patients”
(v). In other words, there is no point in trying to evaluate the anecdotal
evidence: it has been manipulated—in the interest of telling a good
story, of course—so it is scientifically worthless.

Although
Oscar takes his place among other alleged animal prodigies (Nickell
2002)—like the dog that supposedly knew when her owner was coming
home (Wiseman et al. 1998)—Dosa’s own assessment at the end of his
suggestive book is quite equivocal (219):

I don’t
really pretend to know the nature of Oscar’s special gift—I am not
an animal behaviorist nor have I rigorously studied the why and how
of his behavior. Whether he is motivated by a refined sense of smell,
a special empathy, or something en­tirely different—your guess is
as good as mine.

Oh, I didn’t
know we were just guessing. My guess is that Oscar is a magnet for fuzzy
thinking. l

Acknowledgments

I am grateful
for research assistance from CFI Libraries Director Tim Binga, as well
as my wife, Diana Harris.

Wiseman,
Richard, Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton. 1998. Can animals detect when
their owners are returning home? An experimental test of the “psychic
pet” phenomenon. British
Journal of Psychology
89: 453–462.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

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